Friday, June 02, 2006

Was the Election of 2004 Stolen?

Crooked Election(s)

I believe the 2000 Presidential Election was crooked. George W. Bush was illegally chosen by five unscrupulous jurists who had the audacity to declare that their ruling should not be used as precedent. Their ruling will be labeled a crass political move by the historians of the future. There is no legitimate question that Al Gore was the choice of the larger number of Floridian voters and of all American voters in that election. We will never know for sure what an official count would have shown after the pre-election and election day shenanigans of the Republicans, since the normal recount procedures were short-circuited by the Republican machine and the court. I believe Gore would have won despite all that with a fair recount.

After the 2004 election I believed the American people had narrowly, unfortunately, regrettably, lamentably, sadly, but factually legitimated the erstwhile illegitimate presidency of the junior Bush. It turns out I may have been too trusting of news organization vigilence and the safeguards that I thought were instituted after the debacle of four years earlier.I heard on CNN tonight that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has written a critique of the 2004 election in Rolling Stone. Read the story and check out his sources.

Kennedy says:

"After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004."

He quotes Lou Harris, the well-known pollster:

''Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen,'' Lou Harris, the father of modern political polling, told me. ''You look at the turnout and votes in individual precincts, compared to the historic patterns in those counties, and you can tell where the discrepancies are. They stand out like a sore thumb.''

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Meanwhile the American people have caught on to Bush and Company. The latest approval/disapproval poll I've seen is 31-63! His favorables have stabilized at about 30 but the unfavorables continue to grow. A Quinnipac poll rates him, by far, the worst president since WWII. I am glad to say that I was part of 6% of the people who saw through him even in September of 2001. Rove will come up with some unethical ploy(s) to try to pull Bush and his congressional co-horts out of the fire before November, but I'm not sure it will work this time.